


And The World Would Roll On

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Death, Frayja who you may know as Keen from Viper in the Garden, Grief, Iskra is a friend's OC, Same person, but he's not being an asshole, listen i have FEELINGS about Frayja and Peeps okay, warning: the people eater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 16:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17165144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: A lot has happened between the end of Viper in the Garden and this piece, and I hesitated posting this because none of the intervening action is published publicly. Half of it exists in an RP and the other half exists only in my head.To make that very long story short, Frayja returns (with her infant son Atlas) with the intent of rescuing her sister Furiosa and the wives, and hatches a plan with the People Eater, with whom she has enough of a history to know he’s the least sympathetic to Joe. She meets Iskra (a friend's OC) who helps. Grudgingly. Leveraging a tottering alliance between Bartertown and Gastown and a pack of Buzzards, and using the threat of the previously unknown military camp Pine Gap, Furiosa and Frayja and their allies defeat Joe and take the Citadel. Richard is allowed to continue to keep the wheels of the new world, as he’s so good at doing, greased.This fic takes place about 3 years after Furiosa claims victory.





	And The World Would Roll On

The reek of Richard’s dying was worse than it had ever been. He’d been dying from the moment she met him, but his time was close, and, as if knowing that, the fleshy stench of corruption had drawn down and tight around him like the greedy thief it was.

And she hadn’t even stepped into his bedroom yet.

Frayja hammered her fist twice on the heavy steel door.

Atlas, beside her, squeezed her right hand in the pause between knock and response: both a request for reassurance and the giving of it.  She squeezed his small hand back: a grateful acceptance of the support and a return of it in kind.

The door’s hinges squealed loudly as it opened; a displeasing aural companion to the smell. Richard left the door squeaky on purpose. Nobody could sneak up on him that way.

A thick greenish wave of Richard’s deathsmell rolled over her as the door opened, and she swallowed. Atlas couldn’t help but react; he made a small soft noise.

 Without having to click her tongue, she knew the person standing on the other side of the door, the one who’d sent the message.

“Sissy let you go, huh?”

Of its own accord, a corner of Frayja’s mouth turned up at the familiar voice, lightly accented with Buzzard. “I come and go as I please, Iskra.”

“I heard it’s worse over there now than it was under Important Jokes.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

“What do you do with the ones that answer the wrong way?”

“Come over and find out,” Frayja said without malice. She and the Buzzard girl hadn’t ever been friends, but they’d worked together, made a deal, done the deal, and helped each other. That counted for something, at least, as far as Frayja was concerned. She doubted Iskra cared about that as much as she did—if at all—but if there was no trust, there was at least understanding. She squeezed Atlas’ hand again. “Iskra, you haven’t officially met Atlas yet. Atlas, this is Iskra. She and Uncle Richard helped us when you were just a baby.”

“Well met, Iskra,” Atlas said politely, his voice even and quiet.

Iskra cawed a crowish laugh. “Ha! No we are fucking not!”

Frayja had been told what Iskra looked like: half the flesh on her face near-gone, teeth exposed in a wild skeletal half-grin, and one eye, clouded over like Frayja’s own, lidless and gaping. But the New Citadel had its own share of wretched men and women disfigured by the poisons inherited from their parents or blasted into them by the malevolent desert. So if Atlas was repulsed by Iskra’s appearance, he had quite a bit of practice in not showing it.

“Let’s get this over with,” Iskra said. “He could have knocked off while we were standing here flapping our fucking stew-holes.” Iskra’s bare feet made sandy  _plap plap plaps_  that led them into Richard’s office, then left to the bedroom.

Frayja closed and bolted the door behind them. Beneath the rolling breakers of the deathsmell, Richard’s office smelled like it usually did: bitter steel, greasy oilsmoke, and the barest hint of good wood, made more tantalizing for the fact that here was the only place she’d ever smelt it. If she were honest with herself, the oasis of scent at Richard’s desk was half the reason she tolerated her duty as ambassador to Gastown. One way or another, she would make sure the desk ended up in the Dome.

Iskra had left the door to Richard’s bedroom, which gave on his office, open, and the deathsmell choked the doorway, weighing Frayja’s senses. She did not pause or hesitate, though, and followed Iskra in. She hadn’t been in Richard’s bedroom since…since Atlas had been an infant. But her memory of the place was only dormant, not gone. It woke and turned her head right to where his bed would be. A single click of her tongue and the fuzzy echoes it returned confirmed it. Richard himself was a humped lump on the bed, smaller, she thought, than he usually seemed. Not surprising. Richard had wasting disease in a few iterations. Atlas’ grip on her hand tightened and he slowed. She squeezed his hand and winked one milkwhite eye at him, a useless gesture to her but meaningful to him:  _We’re all right._

Richard’s labored breathing reached her, and more than his reduced bulk it strummed a string in her heart. Richard had never been quiet because he’d never been healthy, but  _goddess_ , he sounded like he was fighting each breath through a soup of his own sickness.

_Well, he is._

She clicked again, reached the far side of his bed without barking her shins or tripping over her son, and took a deep breath, filling her own healthy lungs with the putrid ghost of what lived in Richard.

“You look terrible,” she said gently.

A bubbly sound more suited to the aged, failing water pipes back home rose from the bed. “Everyone’s a critic.”

It came out like muddy gravel:  _Eb’rywunnsa griddig._  Frayja clenched her jaw against a spike of sorrow. This man had been engine of her people’s destruction and agent of her son’s saving; party to the end of the world and instrument of the beginning of two new ones, and she did not like the jostling herd of emotions crowding her brain.

“Thank you for… coming, Frayja.”  _T’angyew pur cubbig, Praya,_  and a horrible bubbling breath in between the words.  The irony of it was terrible. Here Richard was, drowning in his body’s own excess, while they at the New Citadel frantically rationed the dregs of the alkali-tasting water that drizzled from the sputtering aquifer pipes.

Frayja scowled. “Save your breath, old man. You wanted to see Atlas…” She tugged him out from behind her. He came gingerly, pressing his back to her legs and keeping both her hands tightly gripped.   _I don’t like it either, son_  she thought at him.  _None of it._

Richard cooed affectionately on his next wheezing exhale. Frayja hadn’t let Atlas come back to Gastown, despite Richard’s repeated asking. So he had missed over a thousand days’ worth of Atlas’ growth.

“He’s…”

“The spitting image of his father, yes,” Frayja said without malice. “I know.” She placed a gentle hand in the thick mess of curls on Atlas’ head, even with the jut of her hip.  _Tall for his age_ , they said.

Richard struggled for his next breath, and it reminded Frayja a little too much of Joe’s son Corpus. At least he didn’t  _stink_  so bad.

“…all grown up.”  _All grod ub._

“Thank you, Uncle Richard,” Atlas said.

Frayja suddenly remembered what kinds of things hung on the wall in the open area to her left, the bare stone space with the floor angled toward a drain: Richard’s  _toys,_  which, if he hadn’t sold or traded it, included a strappy leather-and-metal thing hung from the ceiling in which one could be trussed like a caught animal. She had no idea how the room was lit; she could only hope it was dim enough to keep the sight of those things from Atlas’ eyes. Those were questions she  _did not_  want to answer. She cleared her throat.

“I know Atlas is mostly why I’m here, but if there’s any business to be done, let’s do it,” she said, angling her head toward Iskra, who’d sat herself down on the opposite side of the bed with a creak of spring.

“None of that,” Richard gurgled.  _Nun ub dad._

Frayja blinked. Why the fuck, then, had he called her here? “I’m not in the business of comforting old men in their dying.”

Richard made that rattle-gurgle sound again, which Frayja took for a laugh.  It ended in a thick, wet cough that was somehow more horrible for its impotence. Whatever boiled in his lungs would stay there until it killed him. “Nobody is these days,” Richard husked. The bedsprings creaked. Iskra padded around the bed and tapped Frayja’s elbow with an object. She held out her hand, and a small canvas bag dropped into it.

“There’s something in there for you and your sister and the kid,” Iskra said brusquely, and retreated to her spot on the other side of the bed.

Frayja squeezed the bag. Nothing felt familiar. “I’ll open it later,” she said, “unless I need to open it now.” She asked the question to Richard, but Iskra answered.

“I don’t give a fuck.”

Taking that as Richard’s feeling on the matter as well, Frayja handed the small bag to Atlas. “Hang on to this for me?”

He took it silently.

“What else?” Frayja asked, to whoever would answer.

Richard heaved in a breath, edged with a grotesque bubbling sound. His normally deep voice was clotted and mangled and robbed of what little resonance it had by sickness (and his missing nose), but Frayja still listened.

“While you were… here you… helped me,” he gurgled, “more than you know.”

She couldn’t help the smallest, quickest curl of her lip. She’d been afraid of this. Running to sentiment, apparently, was another disease of old men. Joe’s, she knew, had been false, designed to appeal to a vein of tenderness in them which, if it had ever been there, he himself had sucked utterly dry. It was hard to tell if Richard’s was sincere, but it didn’t matter either way. Mister Wheel-and-Deal couldn’t wheel or deal himself out of the death that crouched so close to him now.

“I almost… left Gastown to you. Iskra didn’t…want it.”

“Fuck this place,” Iskra said halfheartedly in Buzzard.

“I…admire you, Frayja…”

Frayja sucked her teeth at Richard, a child-scolding gesture she’d learned from Miss Giddy. “Please. Dying’s no time or place to be false. Even for you.”

“You and…Iskra both,” he said, undeterred by Frayja or the soup in his lungs. “You have…courage…I thought had… all died out…until I…met you.”

“Empty words, old man. You admire my courage so much, but you never chose to have it.”

“Too late for me,” Richard wheezed.

“Never.” Frayja shook her head, her growing-out hair brushing her jawline and falling across her face. “Never too late.”

“Too lazy then.”

Frayja said nothing. She’d fought this fight with him before, and she had no stomach for fighting it again, even knowing she’d, by default, have the last word.

“Nevertheless,…you… Iskra…helped.”

Richard’s words and breath lapsed into silence. Frayja didn’t realize she was holding her own until Richard suddenly drew a great and rattling inhale.

“Fuck,” Iskra croaked, relief in her voice.

Frayja sensed there was more to the conversation, but Richard had no strength left. All that came out of him on the next exhale was a grunt and a stuttering sigh. Silence squatted meanly over them, punctuated by Richard’s breathing.

Frayja sighed and pressed her hands reassuringly against the thin homespun cloth over Atlas’ narrow little-boy chest, more for her own sake than his. Her natural state was silence; her silence allowed her to hear everything else that wasn’t. Her silence was her sword and shield; it was her savior; it was her watchdog and constant companion, even before her sight was stolen. So filling the silence with her own talking was not just unpleasant; it was almost painful.  

“You once told me I reminded you of your wife. Victoria.“ She’d liked the name then; liked it still. So much that when the second healthy girlchild had been born at the Citadel– not by Joe– Frayja had convinced her mother to dub her Victoria. But Frayja wouldn’t tell Richard that. The name didn’t belong with him anymore. It belonged to the world that would roll on without him. She had another reason, a petty, ugly, selfish one: he didn’t deserve to know. "If she  _was_  anything like me, she wouldn’t have married you if she hadn’t seen in you a little of the strength and courage you see in us.”

Hadn’t she moments earlier refused to let herself fight this battle again? What the fuck did it matter to her if Richard spent his last moments well? By convincing Furiosa to spare his life and allow him to continue his leadership of Gastown in partnership with the New Citadel and Bartertown, hadn’t Frayja paid him back for the debts she’d owed him for harboring her and helping her slip out from under Joe’s grasp (again)? She owed this rotten man nothing, nothing anymore; she cared  _nothing_ for him,  _nothing_ anymore.

Yet, now that she had begun speaking, she couldn’t stop. Atlas hooked his little hands onto the harness hers made across his neck and shoulders, the drawstring on the canvas bag she’d given him looped over his left pinky finger.

“I wasn’t there when Kalashnikov died, but I heard he died screaming like a bird. Joe died with a lie and a threat and a whine on his lips.” Her own curled in contempt involuntarily. She no longer relished that moment, the surprisingly bloodless and quiet climax of a deliciously vicious run of days from his capture through his breaking to his end. “Don’t die like him. Either of them. At  _least_  have the courage to not die like them.”

And what, exactly, did that mean? Richard couldn’t very well leap out of bed and go out in a blaze of glory. Indeed, blazes were few and far between now that Pine Gap was a burnt-out tomb, the leadership at Irontown (formerly the Bullet Farm) was installed and established, and the relationship between New Citadel and Bartertown was secure in the supply lines Richard had set up, with her help (and rumors of some underground ones, thanks to Iskra and her family).

What, exactly, did she want from him? Why, if she cared so little for this rotten man, had she clamped her jaws around this old bone again and shaken it for the dozenth time?

_He soothed your baby’s cries when you could not._

_He poisoned the Green Place. Drove us apart. Ruined us._

_He kept you safe. Risked his life to keep yours._

_He did it because we made a deal._

_Without him you’d be dead._

_He made me fuck him with a fake schlanger!_

_Without him your son would be dead._

_His cowardice and selfishness helped end the world._

_He took your infant son in his arms and soothed him when you could not. Without him you would have died under Joe’s bootheel. Without him there would be none of this. He took your infant son in his arms and returned him to yours safe and whole and happier than when he’d left them._

Frayja loathed whatever deep and senselessly primal part of her brain that set her son’s life equal to– more than– the lot of her people’s. She set her jaw against the herd of emotions in her, drummed up to a thunderous roar, forced her voice even and firm when she spoke. “You also once listed your good deeds to me, do you remember?” She slid one hand out of Atlas’ warm grasp and held up her first finger: “Victoria.” The second: “Your son.” The third: “Your daughter.” The pinky: “Helping Atlas and me.” The thumb, and a head tilt toward Iskra’s sounds: “Helping Iskra.” She closed her fist, then held up her first finger again: “Dying.”

She let the word slither from her lips to loop around the sound of Richard’s glubbery breathing. Her hand lowered back to Atlas’ shoulders, and his returned to its place atop hers.

“And I said the goodness of it depended on  _how_  you died.  Show me I was wrong to think you a coward to the last.”

_You were as close to a father Atlas is ever going to get,_  she thought at him but would never ever say.  _Show him what it is to die well._

Another long, slow, stinking silence unwound around them, but Frayja remained quiet. She’d snapped at him more bitterly than she’d meant to, but she would not apologize, even to herself.  _He deserves it, and lifetimes more._

There was shuffling motion on the bed, but Frayja couldn’t tell who moved. Most likely Iskra. She guessed Richard wouldn’t be up to much motion.

“I’ve always wanted…. to die in my….sleep, or… barring that, surr…surrounded by…. family,” Richard finally said, the last word little more than a thick, wet burble.

Iskra muttered something in Buzzard, too soft for Frayja to catch.

“And that’s… exactly what I’m…doing.”

The meaning of Richard’s garbled words hit Frayja only after a few seconds. Her bonewhite eyes flew wide.

Atlas’ head pressed against her thigh. "Mum, I think he wants you to hold his hand.”

She balked, for reasons old and new, meaningless and urgent. Before she could decide whether or not to move, Atlas twisted his shoulders out from under her hands, and, keeping her second and third fingers gripped tight with his left hand, reached his right out. She opened her mouth to protest, but closed it. There was a small bottle of alcohol– or the nearest to it they could get from distilling guzzoline again and again and again– in the medkit in the car. She’d have Atlas scrub his hands. Until then, she’d hold that hand tight so he couldn’t stick his finger halfway up his nose and dig around like he never thought she knew he did.

Motherhood granted you a second pair of eyes after all.

When Richard spoke again, there was less of him and more of the sickness in the sound. “My dying…won’t be…exemplary… but I’m…glad it…is what it is.”

“Far more than you deserve, old man,” Frayja almost said, but didn’t. Not after the speech she’d just given.

“Good man,” Richard said, and again it took Frayja a moment to realize that Richard was talking to Atlas. “Good man,” he said again, and Atlas took his hand back. Frayja immediately covered it with her own.

Like a strange jewel, Frayja would turn over Richard’s last four words to her son in her head many times over many coming days.

Richard then made a soft wet noise, which Frayja understood was words meant only for Iskra. Iskra murmured back. Frayja cocked her head, but couldn’t pick out anything for Richard’s sickness and Iskra’s pidgin. They must have been very close to each other to speak so softly; maybe forehead to forehead.

The thought was touching and repugnant.

Silence dropped over them again, and Frayja was too lost in thought to notice it was total until Iskra made a noise halfway between a growl and a sob and rustled the bed.

Frayja’s heart skipkicked in her chest. Iskra brushed past her, raw, red grief sizzling on her like an acid burn. Something metal rattled violently to Frayja’s left, and she knew it to be the locked cupboard where Richard kept the kind of alcohol you drank. Iskra barked angrily. Frayja angled her head back to the bed.

As soft as a rustle of leaves or as loud as a gunshot, Frayja’s world was alive with a series of blurry, half-formed greyish sound-shapes, which sharpened as the sounds from them or around them got louder and fuzzed out to blackness the quieter things became.

Even the walls of Gastown made dim grey noise, for the pipes behind them that pumped oil and guzz through its guts in unfathomable quantities breathed and pulsed.

But Richard– or the black totality that once was Richard– remained utterly still in a shroud of its own silence. Frayja stared at it,  _saw_  it, and if she’d known the phrase  _black hole_ , she’d have seized upon it.

Iskra growled, cursed, rattled the cupboard, sending a jagged spray of sound against Frayja.

Atlas tugged his right hand– the one that Richard had held– out of his mother’s grasp. His shoulder muscle slid beneath his smooth skin as he raised his hand, then brought it back down and tapped the back of Frayja’s hand, which lay over his chest, with a loose fist.

The motion– a reaching up for the escaping essence of the dead and a promise to always keep it close to one’s heart– Atlas had learned, alongside the reality of death, from Frayja’s sisters as they’d lain a few of their own to rest over the days: Miss Giddy, Maadi, Keeper, the history man, Clemintine, Cheedo.

Atlas had learned the motion, but not the full arc of meaning behind it.

Frayja’s face twisted with something that wasn’t bitterness or sorrow or rage or pain or irritation but was a little of all those. She enclosed his little fist in her bigger one.  "Not for him,“ she whispered to Atlas, her voice tight with emotion.

"Why not?” He asked.

“He’s done terrible things.”

“But he’s done six  _good_ things. And he just called us family.”

The cupboard finally gave up. Iskra grunted. Glass, dulled by fullness, clunked against metal. Iskra muttered in Buzzard: “Stupid piece of shit. Stupid fucking  _boar_.”

Hot tears burned the back of her eyes, but not just from grief. From  _everything else_ too _._  She hated this,  _hated_  that she couldn’t just hate him  _or_  like him, that triumph galloped shoulder to shoulder with grief and rage and relief in her mind.

In one sudden, fluid motion, she dipped down, grabbed Atlas under his arms, and hoisted him into hers. He obediently wrapped his arms around her neck, the canvas bag resting against the top of her spine. She buried her face in the space between his neck and shoulder, one strong arm supporting his bottom and one hand splayed clawlike against the base of his neck. His wild curls tickled her eyelids.

The goddessdamned thing about it was that there had been nothing to mark the moment of Richard’s dying; nothing to make it exemplary…or not. Nothing except his own last breath, lost among the many and many and many of the machines around them. There was not even a hitch or a pause in the churning guts of Gastown, no magical ripple of knowing among the human occupants, no slow and keening cry of grief from them like there had been from the warboys still loyal to Joe. And why would there have been?

And  _why_  did it  _matter so much?_

It mattered, in part, because Richard was the last. Against the demands of the wasteland and every guess and bet and wish its denizens at the New Citadel made, he was the last.  The last anchor, chained still to the golden and broken Before, that had survived the maelstrom he had helped create to sling his strange hooked burden into the unwilling hands of those upon whose brows, wet with birthwater and their mother’s blood, the poisonous dust still settled.

Finally, the last chain had snapped, but the burden would remain.

And the world would roll on.

Iskra moved past her and out of the bedroom, carrying the burden of her grief with her.

Frayja breathed in the smells in Atlas’ hair: alkaline desert, always, but even that was a welcome change from the sickroom smell; the good, thick soil on the rooftop gardens, where Atlas loved to run and climb; and his scent, which was both like her own and not, as yet not at all like his father’s. Her finger brushed over a scar on his scalp, a small raised dot of flesh. The letter A in the dot-language called Braille she had re-taught herself in this very room.

Then another memory of another Braille letter hit her with a storm-force uppercut: The F she had carved gleefully, ragefully, on Richard’s wide hairy arsecheek.

A strangled bark of laughter burst from her, and then another. She curled into Atlas’ shoulder, wracked with crazed giggles which she hoped desperately Iskra, if she were still in earshot, would take as sobs.

Atlas, patient soul he was, remained still and let his mother have her cackling breakdown against his little body. Slowly the fit subsided into sporadic hiccups. Frayja lifted her head. “You all right, son?”

“Yes, mum.”

She nodded and released him; he slid gently down to the floor. With an understanding that was automatic and subconscious, Atlas took her left hand with his right and led her out of the bedroom into the office. The deathsmell receded, and so too did the storm in Frayja’s mind.

Richard’s chair creaked; Frayja snapped her head to the left. “Iskra?”

“Yeah,” Atlas said.

Frayja opened her mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. “Do you need help? With…Richard?”

The chair creaked again. It sounded old and tired and ill, like its former owner. “ _Nyet,”_  Iskra said flatly.

Frayja nodded. She wondered briefly what Iskra would do with his body and how, but Richard was not her business any longer. He and Iskra had always belonged to each other, as much as the wasteland and its jealous teeth could let anyone belong to anyone else.

“I’m coming back for that desk,” she said softly but firmly. “I want it.”

“Good fucking luck getting it through the door,” Iskra snapped. “It’s twice as wide.”

“He took it up here. I’m going to take it back down.”

“Why do you fucking care so much?” There were no tears in her voice.

“It smells good.”

Iskra said nothing.

Frayja turned away from her. Atlas led her to the door, lifted up the hand he held, and touched it to the lock. She unbolted the door. It complained loudly as it had done when they’d come in, as it had done every single time she’d crossed that threshold. The first time she’d crossed it as Thunderdome meat.

How far she’d come.

Atlas pulled her into the oil-smelling hallway, glad to be out. She planted a foot and stayed him. To Iskra, she said, “Whenever you want it or need it, you’ll have a place at the New Citadel. The Vuvalini know who you are, and we’ve already agreed.”

She didn’t wait for a response and didn’t get one.

Frayja let Atlas lead them through the narrow, twisting steel corridors, nudging him along the correct course when he forgot his way. Which was only three times. The boy had only been down this path once, going the opposite direction, but his eyes and his memory were killing-sharp.

“How’d it go?” Talon asked as he turned the car out on to the long road homeward.

Frayja pulled a small tin bottle out from a pocket on the door to her right, pulled out the stopper, and dipped a small puddle into her hands. She handed the bottle to Atlas on her left, snugged between her and the young man at the wheel. “Wash your hands.” She then rubbed her hands together, coating them with cold wetness that evaporated as it spread. The acrid bite of alcohol burned her nostrils, and it was what she needed to clear the last of Richard’s deathsmell out of her head.

“It went like I thought it would,” she told Talon, “and nothing like I thought it would.”

“I heard he was going to give Gastown to Auntie.”

Frayja smiled at his ill-concealed attempt at gaining gossip and took the bottle Atlas nudged into her hand. “Whatever he’d planned to do with Gastown, he didn’t tell me.” Though, she suspected, whatever object he’d put in the little bag for Furiosa might give a clue at least.

As if plucking the thought out of her head, Atlas asked, “Mum, can I open Uncle Richard’s present?”

Talon, though not much past puphood, had a level head and a wise heart. He knew the difference between harmless gossip and weaponized words, so he would keep to himself whatever he saw. “Yes,” Frayja said.

She could not pick up any aural clues to the contents of the bag over the whipping wind and growling engine, and had to wait until Atlas placed something into her waiting hand. She cocked her head, brows furrowed, and inspected the bundle of…wires? With her fingertips. They were coarse and long, folded over a few times and bound with twine. This one was thicker than the others—

Frayja gasped, warm surprise and pleasure suffusing her. “Guitar strings! A whole damn set!”

“What strings?” Talon asked.

“A musical instrument. In the Dome. It’s propped up against the wall by the piano. The thing with the curvy body and long neck?”

“Yeah.”

Frayja held up the bundle, grinning. “You run these from one end to another, wind them tight, then pluck them. They make good music.”

“That makes fuckall sense to me.”

“I’ll show you when we get home. What else is in there, son?”

Atlas pressed another object into her hand. It was heavy for its size; a solid metal circle thicker on one side than the other. The thick side had carvings, but they were too small and detailed for Frayja’s fingers to make sense of. This was a Before-thing. A ring, meant to go on a finger far thicker than hers or Atlas’. Inside the loop was curled a small roll of paper. She unrolled it and was pleasantly surprised to find Braille. Badly written and juxtaposed in several places, but she could make it out.

_The only punch I ever threw was in defense of my mother. This ring was on my finger when I did it. I hope Atlas never has to raise his fist at all—certainly not in your defense–but in case he does this will make any more punches unnecessary. R._

Frayja cocked a smile, handed the ring to Atlas, and slipped the paper into her pocket. “Put that in a safe place, son. We’ll find something to make it into a necklace later.”

“It’s got a little green shiny thing in it,” he said after a pause.

Frayja ruffled his hair affectionately. “There’s one more thing in the bag, right? What is it?” She held out her hand and Atlas deposited Furiosa’s present into it.

Frayja recognized it immediately by both smell and touch; it was folded leather that had spent quite a bit of time in Richard’s desk, for it smelled of wood, of earth, of something good and long gone. She unfolded it to a square roughly the size of her lap. She lay it there and ran her hand across it, but could not feel any Braille. The leather itself was old and worn, but whole. Large. It must have been the cover of one of Richard’s ledgers. But why would he have sacrificed something so important to him just to give Furiosa a piece of leather? She flipped it over to the smoother side. There was no Braille here, either, but there  _were_ markings either pressed or burned into the hide. Lines. “Atlas…”

“A picture,” he confirmed. “A map!”

“Are there words?”

“Yeah.”

Frayja leaned forward, as if she could peer at the map and read it herself, her heart suddenly and inexplicably galloping in her chest. Talon couldn’t read yet and was driving anyway. “Anything else besides lines and words? Is there a legend?”

“Kinda,” Atlas said after a pause. A small weight pressed into her left thigh close to the knee. His finger. “That’s us. Boltcutters, harpoon, oil tower.”

The sigils of the New Citadel, Irontown, and Gastown.

Then Atlas pressed his finger about an inch lower, to the left. “There’s Bartertown. Auntie’s mark.” Atlas took her hand this time and pressed her finger onto the map between her legs, halfway between her crotch and her knees. “Looks like a… triangle? With points on the sides and a leg on the bottom.”

Frayja knew it immediately. “A tree. That was Pine Gap.”

_What are you leading us to, Richard?_

Atlas leaned over her, pressing himself against her left leg. He guided her finger to the far right edge of the map, which, if her sense of direction were right, was hundreds and hundreds of miles to the east, and a little south. Clear on the other side of the salt flats, if not beyond them. Further than anyone she knew had been.

Atlas touched her finger to the edge of the map dangling off her right leg, but said nothing. Blood roared past Frayja’s ears. Neither Atlas or his mother noticed Talon nervously glancing at Frayja, her wide white eyes nearly bugging out of her head.

“What’s the symbol, Atlas? What does it look like?” She rasped, her voice hoarse with anticipation.

“I dunno,” he said timidly.

Frayja ran her finger over the shape, barely there. “Describe it.”

“Looks like… just a lumpy circle with a little… thing sticking out of it. Like a polecat’s pole. There’s a flat line through the middle of the pole. And two squiggly lines under the circle.”

Frayja let out the breath she was holding in a weak wheeze. She didn’t know what the lumpy circle meant, but she  _did_  know what the two squiggly lines meant:  _water_.

And then, suddenly, she  _did_ know what the lumpy circle meant, because they lived on and by one such circle: an aquifer. The lumpy circle was the underground supply, and the pole was the access point, funneled up above ground level.

“Oh goddess oh green and blessed goddess he found us  _water._ ”

“ _What_?” Talon asked, his voice an octave above its normal.

“It’s an aquifer,” Frayja breathed. “Just like the one we have. He found us  _water_!” Frayja barked joyfully and snagged Atlas in a tight hug.

 “That’s good. We need water,” Atlas mumbled into his mother’s chest.

“We Mcfuckin’ sure  _do_ ,” Talon said. “Are you sure that’s what it is?”

“I’m almost sure,” Frayja said, unable to pull her full-toothed grin down even an inch. “I know what the symbol for water is, and that shape is almost exactly how our aquifer is. At least that’s how Miss Giddy described it to me. I…I really do think this is it.” She struck the map with a fist. “Richard you absolute  _boulder_ , how long had you been sitting your giant hairy arse on this?” Frayja and Talon laughed together.

“Seven,” Atlas said.

“What?” Frayja asked.

“Seven good things.”

Frayja, struck silent, blinked. A hot, spiky lump rose in her chest. She cupped her son’s cheeks in her hands, kissed his smooth forehead, then touched it to her own. “Seven,” she told him. Then she reached up her right hand, the tips of her fingers brushing the roof of the car, closed it, and tapped her fist against her chest.


End file.
